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Friday, 13 May 2016

The silent twins: The case of the Gibbons sisters

“Someone is driving her insane. It is me.” If you’re unfamiliar with the story and enjoy scaring yourself out of your mind, the unbelievable case of the twin Gibbons sisters is both endlessly fascinating and disturbing. “Born in 1963, June and Jennifer [Gibbons] were moved by their Barbadian parents to a small town off the coast of Wales… the two had never spoken to anyone else their entire lives. Instead, they communicated with each other in a strange, birdlike language only they could understand… At age 14, the twins were separated in an attempt to encourage socialization. They responded by slipping into catatonic states.” The birdlike language they spoke would later be revealed to simply be English sped-up, and as incomprehensible as their speaking could be, their written diaries were written in incredibly tiny handwriting. It’s in their diaries their voices come through, and where each revealed her mutual obsession and sometimes murderous hatred of the other twin. “Nobody suffers the way I do, not with a sister… a dark shadow robbing me of sunlight, is my one and only torment… She wants us to be equal. There is a murderous gleam in her eye. Dear lord, I am scared of her. She is not normal … someone is driving her insane. It is me.” The twins would later be committed to a high security psychiatric hospital where one of the sisters died under mysterious circumstances. (Read Silent Twins: The haunting case of the Gibbons Siblings in The Lineup and continue with ‘Have I the strength to kill her?’ by April de Angelis in the Guardian for more background)

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